The Twilight Zone

• We engage with these things to reveal unseen tensions – political, ideological and social – that can then be mapped against what cultural arbiters generally deem more significant.
• The point of this kind of critique is to make the everyday strange, to reveal the ideological forces that sustain its function.
• It was with this in mind that I eagerly opened Michael J. Seidlinger’s recent book in the Bloomsbury series, Scream.
• A cultural history of screaming throughout horror cinema, heavy metal, art, social life?

I scream, therefore I am

• Seidlinger’s text is often pitched in the lexicon of self-affirmation, echoing online victim culture: “I scream therefore I am”.
• These cover growing up, feeling awkward, and turning to screaming media (mainly horror cinema and nu-metal) as a way of trying to deal with that.
• The annual “Grito de Dolores” festival, for example, which celebrates the start of the Mexican War of Independence.
• Or Ashley Peldon, Hollywood voice actor and screamer extraordinaire, who has opened up her lungs in numerous films and videogames.
• While these mistakes are not major in and of themselves, they draw attention to the dilettantish nature of the project as a whole.

Low-stakes victimhood

• Instead, it’s mainly a kind of confessional exercise by Seidlinger, as he interminably riffs on his screaming attempts to overcome the traumas of his youth.
• (How many times can you mention you have panic attacks in a 25,000-word book?)
• The problem is, the stakes of his victimhood are remarkably low.
• A major trauma, for example, is the fact his mother made him stay at the table until he’d eaten his food.
• Again, it’s a neat idea for a book – but his understanding of people is both incredibly generic and overly personal.

Howlers and nonsense

• At times I felt like I had woken up in an episode of The Twilight Zone, given Bloomsbury’s excellent track record.
• They can be useful in popular writing as blunt and inexact instruments, for this very reason.
• Aside from obvious howlers, such as where he refers to The Scream as “the famous painting that everyone knows about”, the prose is full of passages that at times border on nonsense.
• And:
  The severity of our emotional condition after losing someone – there is rarely a more saddening feeling.
• But the writing falls well below the standard of, say, an article in a popular newspaper or magazine.
• The prose tries to be lively, but it feels lightweight and repetitive – personal in an attempt to cover up its lack of substance.